As Washington begins to debate tax reform in earnest, states can provide instructive policy lessons for better and sometimes worse—see the fiscal crack-ups in Connecticut and Illinois. Michigan, on the other hand, offers a case study in the pro-growth potential of business tax reform.

Former Michigan Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm was a progressive specialist in using the tax code to politically allocate capital, which depressed and distorted business investment. Between 2002 and 2007, Michigan was the only state to experience zero economic growth.

Ms. Granholm’s Republican successor, Rick Snyder, recharged growth with tax and regulatory reforms. While Michigan’s GDP has been expanding at roughly the national average since 2011, it has led the Great Lakes region.

Michigan slipped into recession in 2003 as manufacturing contracted, which unions blamed on China and free-trade agreements. But misguided policies were arguably bigger contributors to Michigan’s slump. Between 2002 and 2007, Michigan’s manufacturing grew at a third of the rate of the Great Lakes region. During this period, motor-vehicle and parts manufacturing in Indiana increased five times as much as in Michigan. And Indiana’s economy is nearly as dependent on vehicle production as Michigan’s.

Democrats in Lansing responded by raising taxes with dispensations for politically favored constituents. In 2007 Democrats increased the state income tax to 4.35% from 3.9%. They also enacted a new business tax with a 4.95% tax on income, a 0.8% gross-receipts tax, plus a 21.99% surcharge on business tax liability.

The three-layered business tax replaced a value-added tax, but retained its flaws—namely, its pyramid structure and myriad carve-outs. New credits were created for Nascar, car dealers, film-production companies, large food retailers and warehouses. Businesses could even pocket $100,000 for contributing to zoos. Care to sponsor a giraffe?

None of the tax gimmicks revived growth, and Michigan’s economy plunged amid the national recession with unemployment hitting 14.9% in June 2009. The auto bailout helped stanch job losses at GM and Chrysler while pension reforms and a two-tier wage scale for new workers made Detroit’s auto makers more economically competitive.

By 2011 when Mr. Snyder assumed office, auto manufacturing had rebounded, but other industries remained limp. Michigan still hadn’t posted annual net job growth since 2005. Its 10.9% unemployment rate was the fourth highest after California, Nevada and Rhode Island.

Mr. Snyder’s first major undertaking with his Republican legislature was to replace the cumbersome state business tax with a 6% corporate tax and trim the individual rate to 4.25%. Michigan’s corporate-tax ranking jumped to seventh from 49th in the Tax Foundation’s business tax climate rankings.

Republicans financed the tax cuts by eliminating most business handouts along with individual income-tax preferences for public pensions and jobless benefits. Credits for children, automobile donations, city income taxes, college tuition and charitable contributions were axed. They also reformed state-worker pensions.

After the 2012 midterm elections, Republicans passed right-to-work legislation that lets workers choose whether to join unions. In 2014 state voters approved a ballot measure backed by the governor to repeal the personal-property tax for small businesses and manufacturers, which was levied on the value of machines and other tangible equipment.

Capital investment and hiring have increased sharply. Two months after Mr. Snyder signed the tax reforms, job growth turned positive. In 2011 Michigan added jobs for the first time in six years, and it has since led the Great Lakes region in manufacturing growth.

Unemployment has fallen below the national average to 3.9% even as the labor-force participation rate has ticked up. The jobless rate is still 5% in Illinois and 5.4% in Ohio, and labor-force participation has declined in both states. Ohio and Illinois are non-right-to-work states with larger individual and business tax burdens. Ohio imposes a gross-receipts tax.

Liberals may want to credit the auto bailout, but auto manufacturing isn’t driving Michigan’s growth. Between 2011 and 2015 (the last year with available disaggregated data), Michigan’s motor-vehicle and parts production increased by 2.3%—half as much as in Indiana and the U.S. During the first quarter of this year, when car sales stalled, overall manufacturing in Michigan still grew by a healthy 7.4%. The Mackinac Center notes that fabricated metals and machinery are doing particularly well, but growth has been broad-based. Since 2011, professional and business services have expanded at an annual 3.6% and IT by 2.7%.

Downtown Detroit is drawing tech firms and young entrepreneurs. Unemployment in the Detroit metro area has fallen to 3.2% from 11.4% six years ago. Businesses in Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids say they can’t find enough workers. Perhaps they should try recruiting in Chicago or New Haven.

The left loves to flog the political revolt against Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax cuts, which they blame for yawning deficits. But the bigger deficit drivers were court-mandated increases in school spending and a slump in farm commodity prices. Republicans also erred by retaining major tax breaks and repealing the income tax for small businesses, which caused some individuals to change their filing status. Caveat, Senators.

The Constitution of 1787 begins with its stirring “We the People of the United States” preamble, then turns to Article I, establishing a national Congress. The article takes up more than half the entire document. Article II, establishing the Executive, and Article III, establishing the Judiciary, are much shorter and less detailed.

The Framers devoted special attention to the Congress because it was the linchpin of their new scheme of government. We often think of the separation of powers as the Constitution’s key innovation — checks and balances among Congress, Executive, and Judiciary would police the excesses of power and keep each branch tolerably honest and accountable. But that required an antecedent invention — a powerful, independent legislature.

During the previous century, elected legislatures in Europe, Britain, and the American colonies had been gaining influence, limiting the age-old prerogatives of monarchs and their ministers, courts, and churches. The Framers took the concept of representative lawmaking and ran with it.

They gave Congress “All legislative Powers” (Article I’s opening words), plus exclusive authority over federal taxing, borrowing, and spending. At the same time, they enumerated the permissible subjects of legislation, confining the federal government to matters of importance to the nation as a whole. And they contrived a complex bicameral structure, with distinct forms of election and representation for the House and Senate. These provisions guaranteed that Congress would be attuned to both popular opinion and regional interests — and would be able to legislate only after deliberation and compromise had produced a broad consensus.

In practice, Congress’ role has been less central than the Framers envisaged. Presidents wear the mantle of national leadership, and propose Marshall Plans and wars on poverty and cancer. Justices wear robes and issue august interpretations of the Constitution. Both have often been decisive forces in our government and politics.

In contrast, Congress lacks personality and dignity. It is an amorphous, fractious, vacillating throng, and often the scene of egregious parochialism and favoritism. There have been many rankings of our best and worst presidents, and some of our best and worst justices, but none of our best and worst congresses.

Yet the Congress has been essential to the success and durability of American government:

It has been a powerful force for expanding individual rights and liberties — from drafting the Bill of Rights in the First Congress to abolishing Jim Crow in the 1960s.

It has exposed and countered executive misdeeds on numerous occasions, Watergate being only the most famous recent instance.

It was, through the late 1960s, financially prudent — keeping regular government operations on a balanced budget, borrowing only for wars, emergencies, and investments (beginning with the Louisiana Purchase), and diligently paying down its debts.

Congress is a reactive institution. It often rejects presidential initiatives and Supreme Court pronouncements, but it sometimes embraces them to momentous effect. As a result, praise and blame of Congress frequently reflect immediate partisan affiliations and policy preferences.

But it is important to set aside such opportunistic carping in evaluating today’s Congress. For the institution itself has been in serious decline for several decades, in ways that imperil the constitutional order we all depend on.

Since the early 1970s, Congress has made a practice of ceding lawmaking power to the executive branch. Its statutes call for clean air, safe products, fair treatment of minority groups, and other worthy goals, but leave the difficult choices — the real legislating — to regulatory agencies. When presidents exercise legislative authority on their own (as George W. Bush did during the financial crisis and Barack Obama did on many occasions), Congress frets but usually goes along. One reason the current Congress is having so much difficulty passing health-care and immigration reform is that its members have forgotten the arts of negotiation and compromise.

During the same period, Congress has abandoned all fiscal discipline. It has transferred most federal spending to budget-free “entitlement” programs — and discontinued annual budgets for the remainder, instead passing emergency “continuing resolutions” each fall just to keep the government functioning. In contrast to all previous congresses, recent ones have borrowed continuously to fund routine government operations and income-transfer programs. That is why Congress hates to increase the federal debt ceiling: the ceiling marks the growing chasm between its own spending and taxing decisions, now officially $20 trillion (but in reality much more).

Why Congress has permitted its constitutional powers to atrophy is a complicated puzzle. Some blame partisan polarization and gridlock, others moral turpitude and a shirking of public responsibility.

I think an important reason is the alacrity of modern communications and political organization. Today’s Congress is subject to pressures for government intervention that are far more numerous and insistent than anything in times past. Congress cannot possibly handle all of these issues itself — the Constitution’s deliberately cumbersome structure guarantees that — so it turns them over to missionary executive agencies. It could not possibly fund all the programs its constituents demand with current tax revenues — even with Scandinavian tax rates — so it borrows as necessary.

Whatever the causes, Congress’ abnegations have left us with a national government that is dangerously unbalanced, bureaucratic, and indebted. To the surprise of many, President Trump has been throwing some controversial issues to the Congress rather than deciding them himself. We should all hope that Congress is able to pick up these gauntlets.

Christopher DeMuth is a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute and a participant of the Federalist Society’s nonpartisan Article I Initiative.

It sure looks that way, based on recent history, and now a female has entered the race for the GOP nomination for SoS to be determined next year.

Mary Treder Lang, a certified public accountant from Grosse Pointe Farms, announced Tuesday that she’ll seek the Republican nod on a platform of “Security, Optimization and Stability,” emphasizing her background in cybersecurity and ability to eliminate the threat of cyber-attacks on Michigan’s election system and the theft of personal information.

Before 1974, no woman of either major political party had ever been elected Michigan Secretary of State, but then Macomb Co. Treasurer Candice Miller, a Republican, scored an upset victory over six-term incumbent Democrat Richard Austin. Austin and his predecessor, Democrat James Hare, had held SoS for 40 straight years. But Miller’s triumph launched a skein of six straight electoral victories in which Miller and two other GOP women, Terri Land and the office’s current occupant, Ruth Johnson, will have served 24 straight years in the office by the end of Johnson’s term-limited tenure next year.

In other words, no Republican man has ever been elected Secretary of State since 1952, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was first elected president. And no female Democrat has ever held the office.

That may change next year, because Jocelyn Benson, a Wayne State University law professor who lost to Johnson in 2010, is again seeking the Democratic nomination. Meanwhile, Treder Land must get by three announced male opponents to win the Republican nod at the 2018 GOP Fall Convention — Shelby Township Clerk Stanley Grot; state Senate Majority Floor Leader Mike Kowall (R-White Lake); and MSU professor Joseph Guzman, who was a co-chair of President Donald Trump’s winning Michigan campaign, assuming all three stay in the race.

Treder Lang has run for office only once before — in 2008, she had the misfortune of winning a slam-bang, multi-candidate Republican primary in the 1st district of the state House of Representatives, only to be buried in the Barack Obama presidential landslide by WSU professor Tim Bledsoe (D-Grosse Pointe), after which time the enclave was reapportioned to make it impossible for a Republican to win there again for the forseeable future.

The blonde, effervescent Treder Lang is touting her 30 years of experience in the private sector, where she has led teams in multiple fields including computer security, finance, sales, and government relations. Since 2015, Treder Lang has been employed by Vista Maria, a Dearborn Heights-based non-profit association focussed on at-risk youth, as the vice president of Development and Major Gifts.

Treder Lang is an appointee of Gov. Rick Snyder to the Eastern Michigan University Board of Regents and also has served on the board of the Michigan Assn of Public Accountants and Michigan State Parks. Perhaps her most colorful achievement is to be the only female ever to serve as Commodore of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club.

Treder Land says she’s prepared to raise and spend half a million dollars just to win her party’s nomination for SoS a year from now, and as much as it takes after that to win the general election.

That’s the message from the Census Bureau’s latest report on “Income and Poverty in the United States.” The news is mostly good. The income of the median household (the one exactly in the middle) rose to a record $59,039; the two-year increase was a strong 8.5 percent. Meanwhile, 2.5 million fewer Americans were living beneath the government’s poverty line ($24,563 for a family of four). The poverty rate fell from 13.5 percent of the population in 2015 to 12.7 percent in 2016.

The Census report reinforces Gallup polls — reported here a few weeks ago — that Americans have re-embraced their middle-class identities. The Great Recession made people feel economically vulnerable and betrayed. Nearly half of Americans self-identified as belonging to the “working and lower classes” — a huge shift from the nearly two-thirds that, before the recession, had classified themselves as “middle class.” Now, Americans have reverted to tradition. Almost two-thirds again call themselves middle class, Gallup finds.

People are reassured, because the economy’s steady, if plodding, performance seems to embody middle-class virtues: order, predictability and hard work. The critics of the recovery as slow and disappointing (me and many others) may have missed the point. By plodding along for eight years, the recovery allowed people to reclaim jobs and confidence. The Census calculates that there were 14 million more year-round full-time workers in 2016 than in 2009, the recession’s low point.

Still, the middle-class revival story can be overdone. The “Income and Poverty” report is crammed full of statistics that define and speak to some pressing national problems. Not all the evidence is upbeat. Here are three sobering takeaways.

First, men’s median wages for full-time, year-round work have stagnated.

As astounding as it seems, men’s median earnings haven’t really increased since the mid-1970s. Here are the figures. In 2016, the median was $51,640 for year-round, full-time workers. In 1975, the comparable figure was $51,766. (Note: All dollar amounts are adjusted for inflation and expressed in 2016 money. Again, the median wage is the one exactly in the middle of the distribution — half are above, half below.)

The causes of the stagnation aren’t clear, but the erosion of well-paying blue-collar jobs has been blamed on many forces: the decline of unions and the loss of factory jobs; automation and new technologies; trade and international competition. A new theory is demographics: As older baby boomers retire, they’re replaced by younger workers at lower wages.

Whatever the explanation, women seem less affected. Indeed, their wages have outpaced men’s, reflecting the opening of better-paid jobs once off-limits to women. In the 1970s, women’s earnings averaged about 60 percent of men’s; now they’re 80 percent. Whether the remaining 20 percent reflects discrimination or the different career paths of men and women is a subject of dispute.

Second, the upper middle class is flourishing — but not the lower classes.

If you take $100,000 as a crude threshold of being upper middle class, then the share of households above the threshold was about a quarter (27.7 percent to be exact) in 2016, up from about a fifth (19.4 percent) in 1990. Black households also experienced rising incomes that boosted them into the upper middle class, though at lower levels. In 2016, one in seven black households (14.9 percent) had incomes exceeding $100,000, up from one in 12 (8.6 percent) in 1990.

By contrast, upward movement at other income levels was slight. Take the new record median household income of $59,038 as an example of what’s happening in the middle of the income distribution. If incomes were rising rapidly, there would be a large gap between today’s incomes and those of the late 1990s. There isn’t. Today’s income is less than 1 percent higher than the previous record of $58,665 achieved in 1999.

Third, almost three-quarters of the rise of Americans living in poverty since 1990 reflects increases in Hispanic poverty — increases linked to immigration, whether legal or illegal.

There’s no table with this figure; but it reflects simple arithmetic. Let’s do it. From 1990 to 2016, the number of people living below the government’s poverty line rose from 33.6 million to 40.6 million, a gain of 7 million. Over the same years, the Hispanics in poverty increased from 6 million to 11.1 million, a gain of 5.1 million and 73 percent of the total 7 million boost.

The message is mixed. It’s true that we have more problems than solutions. Immigration, stagnant wages and household inequality are mere examples. But the middle-class comeback, sketchy and possibly temporary, inspires hope. Amid much pessimism, sometimes events surprise us for the better.

American colleges and universities should be bastions of self-knowledge and self-criticism, simply because they exist to teach people how to think. But in recent years America’s campuses seem to have abandoned this tradition. Worse, the meager course offerings on the topic of liberal education tend to reinforce misunderstandings about its character and content.

I reviewed the course listings at five top private universities: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Yale; six high-ranking public research universities: UC Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, North Carolina and Virginia; and five distinguished liberal arts colleges: Amherst, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Wellesley and Williams.

Few of the liberal arts and sciences faculty at these schools offer courses that explore the origins, structure, substance and aims of the education that they supposedly deliver. Instead they provide a smattering of classes on hot-button topics in higher education such as multiculturalism, inequality, gender and immigration. This is no trivial oversight, as the quality of American freedom depends on the quality of Americans’ education about freedom.

A tiny number of elective classes on the curriculum’s periphery—taught for the most part by part-time professors—approach the heart of the matter. Harvard presents a few freshman seminars on the history of the university and issues in higher education. One called “What Is College and What Is It For?” addresses “what constitutes a liberal arts education.” Michigan offers a first-year seminar that considers a university education’s purpose. In Stanford’s freshman program “Thinking Matters,” students examine the relation between the university’s pursuit of knowledge and its pursuit of justice.

Not one political science department at the 16 top schools I reviewed offers a course on liberal education. Isolated offerings concerning the topic are taught in Williams’s philosophy and English departments, as well as in Education Studies at Yale and American Studies at Stanford. Meantime, Princeton, Wellesley and the Universities of North Carolina and Virginia teach their own history.

Overall, the pickings for courses on liberal education are slim. And they tend to reinforce the politicization that afflicts higher education by focusing on the extent to which education advances social justice.

Don’t expect to find much guidance on liberal education in the mission statements of leading American colleges and universities. They contain inflated language about diversity, inclusion and building a better world through social transformation. Missing are instructive pronouncements about what constitutes an educated person or on the virtues of mind and character that underlie reasoned inquiry, the advance of understanding, and the pursuit of truth. Instruction on the ideas, norms and procedures that constitute communities of free men and women devoted to research and study are also scarce to nonexistent.

Hope should not be pinned on colleges and universities to reform themselves. Perhaps a university president or provost who prioritizes recovering liberal education will emerge, but progressive ideology remains deeply entrenched in administrations and faculty. Tenured professors want to reproduce their sensibilities in their successors, and huge endowments insulate the best universities from market forces that could align their programs with the promise of liberal education.

Major impetus for reform must come from outside the academy. Legislative initiatives designed to impel public universities to honor their First Amendment obligations, like the Goldwater Institute’s model bill for state legislatures, might also spur private universities to reinvigorate their commitments to free speech. And educational entrepreneurs could develop alternative accrediting companies.

Private donors and foundations should further establish special faculty-driven programs in the humanities and social sciences like the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard, the James Madison Program at Princeton, and the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. These programs teach neglected ideas and books that form an essential part of the Western tradition of freedom.

Student-run organizations like the Federalist Society at law schools and the Alexander Hamilton Society, which focuses on foreign affairs and national security, are other good vehicles for educating students in freedom. They do well at staging debates on complex issues.

Philanthropic organizations—such as the Hertog Foundation, for which I teach—should continue to develop independent gap-year, summer and postgraduate programs providing students with a taste of the great books, the American constitutional tradition, and diplomatic and military history.

It is consistent with the tradition of freedom in which liberal education is rooted to rely on the private sector to lead a reform movement on and off campus. These small steps move us closer to restoring liberal education and equipping members of the next generation with the ability to think for themselves.

The researcher who helped confirm the Flint water crisis said Friday the city’s quality of water is testing at federally acceptable levels but residents still distrust the once-contaminated water supply.

Researchers from the Virginia Tech College of Engineering led by professor Marc Edwards showed that federal standards are now being met and that five rounds of citizen-led testing will now cease. Testing of 138 Flint homes showed an average lead reading in August of 8.3 parts per billion, below the federal standard of 15 parts per billion.

The results were significant because they happened during warmer weather when corrosion and lead contamination is more likely to occur, Virginia Tech scientists said.

The August results followed a November 2016 finding of 8.4 parts per billion.

“Today, we have … definitive data showing that the levels of these parameters currently in Flint water are back to normal levels for a city with old lead pipes,” said Virginia Tech’s Marc Edwards during a news conference in Virginia.

Edwards and 44 other researchers who are part of his team warned that residents should still take precautions with the water by using filters and bottled water, which is still being distributed throughout the city. These practices will, the researchers said, limit any residual lead exposure.

“If you define the end of the water crisis as having water quality parameters back in the range considered normal for other cities with old lead pipes, the answer is yes,” Edwards said in response to a reporter’s question.

“Obviously, there’s still a crisis of confidence amongst Flint residents that’s not going to be restored anytime soon. It’s beyond the reach of science to solve, but it can only be addressed by years of trustworthy behavior by government agencies who, unfortunately, lost that trust, deservedly, in the first place.”

Edwards’ comments echoed those of former President Barack Obama, who visited Flint in May 2016 to tell residents that filtered water was safe to drink and then took a sip — a gesture that still didn’t win over many of the 1,100 people who attended his speech at Northwestern High School.

“Although I understand the fear and concern that people have, and it is entirely legitimate, what the science tells us at this stage is you should not drink any of the water that is not filtered but if you get the filter and use it properly, that water can be consumed,” Obama said 16 months ago. “That’s information that I trust and I believe.”

The testing announcement caught off-guard Flint Mayor Karen Weaver.

“It would have been nice to have had an opportunity to review the data before an announcement was made publicly that speaks of the beginning of the end to our city’s water crisis,” Weaver said in a statement. “Nevertheless, it is encouraging to hear that the test results from Edwards and his team at Virginia Tech show Flint’s water quality, as it relates to lead, continues to improve.”

The mayor said her top priority “remains getting all lead-tainted pipes in Flint replaced.”

The city is the midst of replacing nearly 20,000 of all its service lines by 2020. In July, Weaver’s administration had replaced service lines in 2,181 homes since March 2016.

The city is trying to replace lead-damaged infrastructure at the pace of 6,000 new pipes annually during the next three years.

Edwards said Virginia Tech would stop citywide testing for lead but would continue monitoring bacteria and chlorine levels in Flint’s water. He said his team was halting the testing for now because its results tracked the results from state of Michigan testing.

Friday is the second anniversary of when Edwards and his team found a citywide lead contamination of the water and reported it to Flint residents outside city hall, he said.

The administration of Gov. Rick Snyder within a month announced there was lead contamination in city water and authorized a switch from the Flint River source back to the Detroit water system the city had used before April 2014.

Former U.S. Army Secretary calls Trump’s military transgender ban ‘unprecedented’

Eric Fanning, who served as U.S. Secretary of the Army under President Barack Obama, speaks to attendees Thursday, Sept. 14 at a speaking event in East Lansing featuring Fanning and Elissa Slotkin, Democratic Congressional candidate for the 8th District. (Lauren Gibbons | MLive.com)

Former U.S. Army Secretary Eric Fanning and Democratic 8th Congressional District candidate Elissa Slotkin host a presentation for a small crowd Thursday, Sept. 14 at The Roadhouse Pub in East Lansing. (Lauren Gibbons | MLive.com)

Former U.S. Army Secretary Eric Fanning said he was furious with President Donald Trump for rescinding on a 2016 rule change allowing transgender people to serve openly in the military, but expressed confidence “justice will prevail” in the long term.

Fanning, who was in East Lansing Thursday for an event with Democratic 8th Congressional District Candidate Elissa Slotkin, said in an interview with MLive that when he first saw the president’s tweet, “it felt like a kick in the stomach.”

“They had been recruited, they were trained and they were doing their jobs,” he said. “To acknowledge that, to put policies in place to acknowledge that it’s already happening, and then to suddenly repeal that is unprecedented in my lifetime.”

Fanning was nominated by former President Barack Obama to serve as U.S. Secretary of the Army in November 2015 and was confirmed by the Senate May 30, 2016, although he’d previously worked in the Department of Defense in other positions with several military service branches. His confirmation made him the first openly gay service secretary in U.S. government history.

Fanning lived in Michigan for several years prior to working in Washington, D.C.

He was U.S. Army Secretary when the Obama administration initially lifted the ban on transgender people openly serving in the military in 2016. Fanning resigned his post shortly before Trump formally took office.

Trump announced he’d reverse the Obama-era policy on Twitter on July 26, writing the decision came “after consultation with my Generals and military experts” and that the military “cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

Since the announcement, Trump has faced blowback from transgender service members and advocacy groups, some of whom have filed lawsuits against the proposal. On Friday, U.S. Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. and other lawmakers introduced bipartisan legislation to protect transgender service members already in the military and require the Department of Defense to conduct a study on future recruitment.

Michigan transgender and LGBT advocacy organizations were critical of President Donald Trump’s announcement to ban transgender individuals from serving in the military Wednesday.

Fanning said Trump’s decison was one of several confusing actions he’s taken in regards to the military and was particularly concerning, as the initial decision to allow transgender troops to openly serve was implemented after more than a year of debate, analysis, discussion and developing policy constructs.

“It’s not even really accurate to say we opened up service to transgender Americans, because thousands of transgender Americans were already serving,” Fanning said. “The analysis is pretty clear that being transgender does not impede your ability to serve in the military.”

Fanning said by announcing the ban, Trump might have helped transgender people in the long run by bringing the issue into the national spotlight.

“In some ways, ironically, the President may have done the community a favor, because it’s now couched in terms of fairness,” he said. “There’s lots of Americans out there who hadn’t thought about this issue, didn’t know that there were already thousands of transgender Americans in uniform.”

“The president has introduced transgender Americans to much of the rest of the country as patriotic Americans, because he’s shed light that they’re serving in uniform and they made this commitment,” Fanning continued.

Some Americans express troubling racial attitudes even as a majority oppose white supremacists, according to a new poll published by Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics in conjunction with Reuters/Ipsos.

The survey found that while there is little national endorsement of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, there are troubling levels of support for certain racially-charged ideas and attitudes frequently expressed by extremist groups. The survey also found backing for keeping Confederate monuments in place, the removal of which has become a hot-button issue in communities across the country.

The large-sample poll (5,360 respondents for most questions) was conducted from Aug. 21 to Sept. 5 in the aftermath of a neo-Nazi rally and counter-protest on the grounds of the University of Virginia and in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11-12.

On Confederate monuments, respondents were given a choice between removing Confederate monuments from all public spaces or keeping all of them in place.

Three-fifths (57%) said that Confederate monuments should remain in public spaces, while a quarter (26%) said they should be removed.

Among African Americans, 54% said all monuments should be removed versus 25% who were inclined to keep all monuments where they are. Whites strongly differed, with two-thirds (67%) saying they should remain in place and just 19% favoring removal.

A plurality of Democrats favored removing all monuments (46%) versus 38% for leaving them in place.

Among those people with a bachelor’s degree or higher, 51% favored keeping the monuments in place versus 34% for removing them.

Some results indicated broad acceptance of racial equality:

Seven in 10 respondents (70%) strongly agreed that people of different races should be “free to live wherever they choose” and that “all races are equal” (70%), with only 2% and 4% of respondents strongly disagreeing, respectively.

A large percentage (89%) agreed that all races should be treated equally, even as 11% answered otherwise: 3% disagreed, 5% neither agreed nor disagreed, and 3% said they didn’t know.

However, other findings presented conflicting opinions about whether and which racial groups may be “under attack” in the United States.

39% of respondents strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that “white people are currently under attack in this country,” while 38% disagreed. Strong disagreement (28%) ranked higher than strong agreement (19%). Among whites, 29% disagreed with this statement, whereas 54% of nonwhites disagreed. Among partisans, 21% of Democrats agreed with the statement to some extent compared to 63% of Republicans. Conversely, 59% of Democrats disagreed (47% strongly) while just 17% of Republicans disagreed. About the same percentage of Democrats and Republicans neither agreed nor disagreed (17% for the former, 18% for the latter).

55% strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that “racial minorities are currently under attack in this country,” while 22% strongly or somewhat disagreed. Just 13% of racial minorities disagreed with the statement while 27% of whites disagreed.

Lastly, the poll found mixed views on Black Lives Matter and a relative unfamiliarity with Antifa compared to other movements and organizations that the survey asked about:

Roughly one-third of respondents (32%) said they supported Black Lives Matter, and another 24% indicated a middle position of neither supporting nor opposing. Among African Americans, 62% voiced support for the group, while 26% of whites and 33% of Hispanics also did.

A plurality of respondents were against BLM, however, with 37% somewhat or strongly opposing the organization. The strongest core of opposition to the group came from whites, with 43% opposing BLM. There was also an obvious partisan difference in support or opposition to the organization: 52% of Democrats supported BLM and 62% of Republicans opposed it.

8% said they strongly or somewhat support Antifa versus 33% strongly opposing Antifa and another 6% somewhat opposing (39% total opposing). There is more uncertainty about Antifa than the alt-right, which could suggest a lack of familiarity with the groups themselves, or with the groups’ ideals: 32% answered “don’t know” when asked about their support or opposition to Antifa, versus 23% who said the same when asked about the alt-right.

A fundamental question that this poll sought to help clarify is whether there is a sizable portion of the American public that could be receptive to the types of messages being disseminated by groups associated with the alt-right and/or white supremacy. When respondents were asked if they supported the alt-right, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis, only a small percentage said they did. But for both the alt-right and white nationalism, about one-fifth of respondents said they neither supported nor opposed those groups or movements.

Within this poll a sizable number of respondents selected the “neither agree nor disagree” option. Given the racially-charged and controversial nature of some of the statements polled, these “middling” answers seemed remarkable, particularly given the fact that a “Don’t know” option was also presented and was available if, for example, one wished to express uncertainty or a lack of knowledge. Ipsos pollster Julia Clark examined the makeup of the “neither agree nor disagree” respondents from this survey. While the profile of these respondents is not uniform, on some of the more notable questions she discovered a general trend showing that these respondents were more likely to have views that leaned more toward intolerance than away from it.

“The ‘Neither agree nor disagree’ respondents, for example, are far less likely to condemn statements against interracial marriage and in favor of preserving white heritage,” said Clark. “In addition, the ‘Neither/Nors’ are notably less likely than other respondents to feel all races should be treated equally or that minorities are under attack. In both cases, and others, this makes their viewpoints more congruous with extremist, anti-equality views than more progressive views.”

The full results and methodology are available here and the crosstabs are available here.

I argued that demographics favored the Democrats. I was wrong. So let’s re-do the math.

If any force on Earth could be powerful enough to unite the Democratic Party, you’d have thought the words “President Donald Trump” would do the trick. Instead, Hillary Clinton’s defeat last November only served to intensify the split within the party. Nine months in, two warring camps continue to offer seemingly irreconcilable versions of what went awry and how to fix it. On one side, populists like Bernie Sanders and Rust Belt Democrats like Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio argue that the party lost by neglecting working-class voters while catering primarily to “identity politics.” On the other side, an equally vocal contingent makes the opposite case: that the Democrats will blow it in 2018 and 2020 if they take voters of color for granted and focus their energy on wooing the white voters who backed Trump.

Steve Phillips of the Center for American Progress, a leading proponent of the latter view, argues that the Democrats doomed themselves in 2016 with “a strategic error: prioritizing the pursuit of wavering whites over investing in and inspiring African American voters.” In the wake of the election, Phillips wrote in The Nation that “the single greatest force shaping American politics today is the demographic revolution that is transforming the racial composition of the U.S. population.”

Taken together, Phillips writes in his book, Brown Is the New White, “progressive people of color” already combine with “progressive whites” to make up 51 percent of voting-age Americans. “And that majority,” he adds, “is getting bigger every single day.” The strategy prescription logically follows. Rejecting the notion that Democrats must woo Trump voters as a “fool’s errand,” Phillips says the party must be “race-conscious and not race-neutral or color-blind.” Demographics are destiny. “The concerns of people of color,” he concludes, “should be driving politics today and into the future.”

This isn’t a new argument, of course—and I bear some responsibility for it. The book I co-wrote in 2002 with demographer Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority, laid out an overly optimistic forecast of the party’s prospects in an increasingly diverse America. By and large, Teixeira still holds to the view that the growth of minority populations will provide a long-term “boost to the left.” In his new book, fittingly titled The Optimistic Leftist,Teixeira notes that by the 2050s, eleven of the 15 largest states will be “majority-minority.”

On one level, there’s no arguing with the math. If you take the percentage of Americans that the U.S. census defines as “minorities” and project their past voting habits into the next decade and beyond, you’ll come up with a very sunny version of the Democrats’ prospects. There are only two problems with this line of thinking, but they’re pretty big ones. For starters, the census prediction of a “majority-minority” America—slated to arrive in 2044—is deeply flawed. And so is the notion that ethnic minorities will always and forever continue to back Democrats in Obama-like numbers.

The U.S. census makes a critical assumption that undermines its predictions of a majority-nonwhite country. It projects that the same percentage of people who currently identify themselves as “Latino” or “Asian” will continue to claim those identities in future generations. In reality, that’s highly unlikely. History shows that as ethnic groups assimilate into American culture, they increasingly identify themselves as “white.”

Whiteness is not a genetic category, after all; it’s a social and political constructthat relies on perception and prejudice. A century ago, Irish, Italians, and Jews were not seen as whites. “This town has 8,000,000 people,” a young Harry Truman wrote his cousin upon visiting New York City in 1918. “7,500,000 of ’em are of Israelish extraction. (400,000 wops and the rest are white people.)” But by the time Truman became president, all those immigrant groups were considered “white.” There’s no reason to imagine that Latinos and Asians won’t follow much the same pattern.

In fact, it’s already happening. In the 2010 Census, 53 percent of Latinos identified as “white,” as did more than half of Asian Americans of mixed parentage. In future generations, those percentages are almost certain to grow. According to a recent Pew study, more than one-quarter of Latinos and Asians marry non-Latinos and non-Asians, and that number will surely continue to climb over the generations.

Unless ethnic identification is defined in purely racial—and racist—terms, the census projections are straight-out wrong and profoundly misleading. So is the assumption that Asians and Latinos will continue to vote at an overwhelming clip for Democrats. This view, which underpins the whole idea of a “new American majority,” ignores the diversity that already prevails among voters lumped together as “Latino” or “Asian.” Cuban-Americans in Miami vote very differently from Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles; immigrants from Japan or Vietnam come from starkly different cultures than those from South Korea or China. While more than two-thirds of Asian voters went for Obama in 2012 and Clinton in 2016, they leaned the other way in the 2014 midterms: National exit polls showed them favoring Republicans by 50 to 49 percent.

Similarly, while Latinos form a strong Democratic bloc in California, in most states they don’t automatically punch the “D.” In Texas, Senator John Cornyn bested his Democratic opponent among Latinos in 2014 by a small margin, and Senator Richard Burr won 49 percent of the Latino vote in North Carolina last year over a strong liberal challenger. In Florida, Marco Rubio almost won the Latino vote in 2016. Those are not the kinds of numbers on which you can build a lasting majority.

Going forward, the real demographic question is not whether voters of color will combine with progressive whites to form a new American majority; it’s whether Democrats, without abandoning their commitment to racial justice and to America’s immigrants, can succeed in crafting a message and an agenda that steers clear of the liberal version of racial stereotyping: assuming that people of color will inevitably vote alike.

Democrats need to heed two obvious but often ignored facts about American politics. The first is that Democrats from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama have succeeded in winning national elections (as have most of the Republicans who’ve entered the White House) by convincingly portraying themselves as the candidates of “the common folk” and “the middle class” against Wall Street and other special interests.

Especially following his noxious comments on Charlottesville, it’s hard to see Trump’s election as anything but a national revival of white supremacy. To be sure, he put out plenty of dog whistles for the racists. But in the general election, Trump ran as the candidate of the “silent majority,” who promised to “make America great again” in the face of opposition from “the establishment.”

There is no need for Democrats to choose between appealing to white workers and courting people of color.

The second fact about elections is that conservatives in both parties have repeatedly defeated left and center-left candidates by dividing their natural constituency—the bottom two-thirds of America’s economic pyramid—along racial or ethnic lines. The Democrats who have successfully countered this divide-and-conquer strategy didn’t turn their backs on the civil rights of African Americans or Mexican-Americans, or on a woman’s right to choose; rather, they emphasized the fundamental interest in prosperity and peace that unites the working and middle classes. Think of Bill Clinton’s “putting people first” campaign in 1992, or Obama’s reelection effort in 2012, when he spent the year contrasting his vision of a country in which “everybody gets a fair shot” with the GOP’s “same old you’re-on-your-own philosophy.”

By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s “Stronger Together” campaign was rooted in the idea of “inclusion.” She conveyed her concern with race, ethnicity, and gender, but not with what Sanders called “the disappearing middle class.”

If Democrats try to win future elections by relying on narrow racial-ethnic targeting, they will not only enable the Republicans to play wedge politics, they will also miss the opportunity to make a broader economic argument. Not long ago, I spoke with Mustafa Tameez, a Houston political consultant who made his name helping to elect the first Vietnamese-American to the Texas House. The momentum in American politics, he believes, is with Democrats who stress “an economic message rather than ethnic-identity politics. We can’t buy into the conservative frame that the Democrats are a party of the minorities.”

This thinking runs contrary to the “race-conscious” strategy touted by Democrats who believe that a majority-minority nation is a guarantee of victory. Sorry to say, but it’s not going to happen. The best way for Democrats to build a lasting majority is to fight for an agenda of shared prosperity that has the power to unite, rather than divide, their natural constituencies. There is no need, in short, for Democrats to choose between appealing to white workers and courting people of color. By making a strong and effective case for economic justice, they can do both at the same time.

Democrats have attacked the president every which way, but polling and focus groups show none of it is working.

Democrats tried attacking Donald Trump as unfit for the presidency. They’ve made the case that he’s ineffective, pointing to his failure to sign a single major piece of legislation into law after eight months in the job. They’ve argued that Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself and that his campaign was in cahoots with Russia.

None of it is working.

Data from a range of focus groups and internal polls in swing states paint a difficult picture for the Democratic Party heading into the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential election. It suggests that Democrats are naive if they believe Trump’s historically low approval numbers mean a landslide is coming. The party is defending 10 Senate seats in states that Trump won and needs to flip 24 House seats to take control of that chamber.

The research, conducted by private firms and for Democratic campaign arms, is rarely made public but was described to POLITICO in interviews with a dozen top operatives who’ve been analyzing the results coming in.

“If that’s the attitude that’s driving the Democratic Party, we’re going to drive right into the ocean,” said Anson Kaye, a strategist at media firm GMMB who worked on the Obama and Clinton campaigns and is in conversations with potential clients for next year.

Worse news, they worry: Many of the ideas party leaders have latched onto in an attempt to appeal to their lost voters — free college tuition, raising the minimum wage to $15, even Medicare for all — test poorly among voters outside the base. The people in these polls and focus groups tend to see those proposals as empty promises, at best.

Pollsters are shocked by how many voters describe themselves as “exhausted” by the constant chaos surrounding Trump, and they find that there’s strong support for a Congress that provides a check on him rather than voting for his agenda most of the time. But he is still viewed as an outsider shaking up the system, which people in the various surveys say they like, and which Democrats don’t stack up well against.

“People do think he’s bringing about change, so it’s hard to say he hasn’t kept his promises,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.

In focus groups, most participants say they’re still impressed with Trump’s business background and tend to give him credit for the improving economy. The window is closing, but they’re still inclined to give him a chance to succeed. More than that, no single Democratic attack on the president is sticking — not on his temperament, his lack of accomplishments or the deals he’s touted that have turned out to be less than advertised, like the president’s claim that he would keep Carrier from shutting down its Indianapolis plant and moving production to Mexico.

Voters are also generally unimpressed by claims that Trump exaggerates or lies, and they don’t see the ongoing Russia investigation adding up to much.

“There are a number of things that are raising questions in voters’ minds against him,” said Matt Canter, who’s been conducting focus groups for Global Strategy Group in swing states. “They’re all raising questions, but we still have to weave it into one succinct narrative about his presidency.”

Stop, Democratic operatives urge voters, assuming that what they think is morally right is the best politics. A case in point is Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville. The president’s equivocation on neo-Nazis was not as much of a political problem as his opponents want to believe, Democratic operatives say, and shifting the debate to whether or not to remove Confederate monuments largely worked for him.

“He is the president. The assessment that voters will make is, is he a good one or not? While Democrats like me have come to conclusions on that question, most of the voters who will decide future elections have not,” Canter said.

Many of the proposals Democrats are pushing fall flat in focus groups and polling.

The call for free college tuition fosters both resentment at ivory tower elitism and regret from people who have degrees but are now buried under debt. Many voters see “free” as a lie — either they’ll end up paying for tuition some other way, or worse, they’ll be paying the tuition of someone else who’ll be getting a degree for free.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and Gerstein Bocian Agne Strategies conducted online polling of 1,000 Democrats and 1,000 swing voters across 52 swing districts for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Their advice to candidates afterward: Drop the talk of free college. Instead, the firms urged Democrats to emphasize making college more affordable and reducing debt, as well as job skills training, according to an internal DCCC memo.

“When Democrats go and talk to working-class voters, we think talking to them about how we can help their children go to college, they have a better life, is great,” said Ali Lapp, executive director of House Majority PAC, which supports Democratic House candidates. “They are not interested. … It’s a problem when you have a growing bloc in the electorate think that college is not good, and they actually disdain folks that go to college.”

Medicare-for-all tests better, but it, too, generates suspicion. The challenge is that most voters in focus groups believe it’s a pipe dream — they ask who will pay for it and suspect it will lead to a government takeover of health care — and therefore wonder whether the politicians talking to them about it are being less than forthright, too. Sen. Bernie Sanders is scheduled to release a single-payer bill on Wednesday, with Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Tammy Baldwin among those joining him.

Health care is one bright spot for Democrats. Obamacare is less unpopular than it used to be, and voters generally want the law to be repaired. Data also show that voters trust Democrats more than Republicans on the issue: Voters rated Trump and Democrats about equally on health care at the start of his term, but Democrats now have a large double-digit lead, according to DCCC polling.

But attacking Republicans on the issue is tricky. The specifics of GOP alternatives are unpopular, but most voters don’t realize Republicans had a plan, so it’s hard to persuade them to care about the details of something that never came to be.

Raising the minimum wage to $15 is as unpopular as it was when the Obama White House tried to make it Democrats’ rallying cry in the 2014 midterms. Participants in battleground-state focus groups said they see that rate as relatively high and the issue in general as being mostly about redistributing money to the poor.

The DCCC memo urges candidates instead to talk about a “living wage,” or to rail against outsourcing jobs.

“What you’re seeing is this thing that Democrats cannot seem to figure out — this notion that somehow if we just put the words together correctly that’ll be the winning message and we’ll win,” Kaye said. “That is the opposite of how the electorate is behaving.”

On immigration and trade, voters remain largely aligned with Trump. Data show that voters believe that the economy is moving in the right direction and resent Democrats attacking its progress.

Late last month, Democratic pollster Peter Hart ran a 12-person focus group in Pittsburgh that shocked him for how quickly and decisively it turned against the president. But he came away wary of Democrats who take that as evidence that attacking Trump will win them elections — even as DCCC and other polling shows voters are turned off by members of Congress who vote with the president 90 percent of the time or more.

“People would like more of a sense of reassurance … than we’ve had so far,” Hart said. “For the Democrats, part of that is recognizing that it’s not that there’s an overwhelming agenda item on the part of the American public — it’s not the economy or health care or some single issue — but it is the sense that somehow things are very out of sorts, and it touches so many different issues.”

That’s the main difference between 2018 and 2006, when Democrats’ strategy primarily consisted of running against an unpopular president, George W. Bush, and an unpopular war.

“It may have worked then,” said former Rep. Steve Israel, the DCCC chair in the 2012 and 2014 cycles and the leader of messaging for House Democrats last year. “I’m not sure it’s going to work now, because the middle class is clamoring for help. Just saying we’re not Trump isn’t going to help.”

More and more, Democratic operatives are gravitating toward pushing for an argument that Trump is just out to make his rich friends richer, at the expense of everyone else. They believe they could include all sorts of attacks on his decisions under that umbrella, from stripping regulations on credit cards to trying to end Obamacare to pushing for corporate tax breaks.

DCCC polling showed that on the question of who “fights for people like me,” Trump and Democrats were split at 50 percent each in February but that Democrats are now ahead by 17 points.

“Everything is a trade-off,” said Guy Cecil, reflecting polling done by his Priorities USA super PAC. Republicans “want to give tax cuts to the rich, and they want to screw the rest of us. This is a quintessential question of whose side are you on.”

Bill Burton, a former Obama aide now at SKDKnickerbocker, said he’s worried Democrats are still not making a convincing argument on economic issues.

But he sees some cause for optimism.

“The question has to be what counts as working — the guy’s approval ratings are in the mid-30s,” Burton said of Trump. “So the other way of looking at this is, everything is working.”